This invention relates to an apparatus and method for baling crimped nylon staple fibers.
The known practice of air doffing or air conveying cut 4 to 8 inch length tufts of crimped staple carpet fibers from a rotary cutter causes entangling of the fibers to a degree that the cut tufts combine into large clumps of randomly oriented fibers which greatly increases the force required to compress a bale of such fibers to its desired final size and also increases the amount of rebound or bloom experienced on opening the bale. This problem is also experienced in gravity doffing systems from rotary cutters where the fibers are allowed to condense by twisting during removal from the cutter. In addition, the conventional practice of pushing large volumes of such cut entangled fibers into a baling chamber or allowing them to free fall a long distance into a tramping chamber promotes further mixing and entangling of the fibers. When bales of these cut staple fibers are then processed in a mill using opening, blending and carding systems, the staple fibers, because of the entanglement, are difficult to process. For example, when such fibers are carded to comb them to parallelism, they may, because of entanglement, be snarled into neps, stretched until crimp is permanently removed or the filaments break.